


Say My Name

by Juni_per



Category: Vampire Hunter D (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Clones, Eventual Romance, F/M, Lust at First Sight, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Rating May Change, Witches, bookverse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-10
Updated: 2020-05-01
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:29:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23583871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Juni_per/pseuds/Juni_per
Summary: On an island of clones, being different means exile. One fault in her making means this clone must brave the Frontier and all its ugliness. She won't have to do it alone.
Relationships: D (Vampire Hunter D)/Original Female Character
Comments: 11
Kudos: 16





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two men, one youth and one elder perched on their cyborg mounts, stole a few moments of respite in the shadow of the lone plateau.
> 
> “Did you see it?” The youth spoke behind a red bandanna that covered his nose.
> 
> “See what?”
> 
> “You didn’t see the island?”
> 
> “I guess I didn’t.”
> 
> “Don’t be like that. You don’t care about nothing, do you?”
> 
> The old man rubbed his tanned and chapped face. “In this ugly world? No.”

She didn’t have a name until her eighteenth birthday. She never wanted one, but, as an exile, her mother said she would need one.

_Seraphina._

“Is that a good name?” she asked her mother as they stood on the beach together one last time. Only their footprints and the trench from the paddle boat they pushed to the shore’s edge marred the sugar-fine sand.

“It’s beautiful, don’t you think?” her mother said, leaning over the boat between them to hold Seraphina’s hand.

“I don’t know,” Seraphina said. “It’s such a long word for—” She stopped when she saw the brimming tears in her mother’s dark eyes. She didn’t know what to say to comfort her mother. She had never seen anyone cry before. Tightening her grip, they stood silently while the sunrise painted the sky with broad strokes of lavender and pink.

Behind them, a group of women and their daughters approached with the gentle crunch of sand. Still in her mother’s grip, Seraphina turned to look at her mothers and sisters. Every mother and every daughter on the beach had the same dark hair, dark eyes, olive skin, and even wore the same flowing red dress. Every mother and every daughter mirrored one another perfectly.

Except for Seraphina.

The nine mothers didn’t cry. Only the mother who had carried her in her womb and brought the imperfect daughter into this world struggled with the odd burst of emotion. Seraphina closed her eyes, her deformity hidden so, for just a moment, she could be a part of her family.

Her mother let go of her hand. Cool fingers traced over her left eyelid that hid an iris so pale green that it looked like bleached wood in the light. Seraphina opened her other eye, dark and warm like the other should have been.

“I’m sorry,” her mother said.

Seraphina moved from her mother’s touch in order to grab the haversack in the paddle boat. “It’s not your fault. It’s happened before, and it will happen again.” The mothers and daughters listening shifted uncomfortably on their feet. Seraphina heard one mother comfort her daughter to not fret so much, that it has only happened three times in ten-thousand years.

“You have those coins, right?”

“Right here,” Seraphina said, pulling a bulging pouch from her bag, jingling the dalas, and shoving them back under the rations.

“Do you remember how to use them?”

“Yes.”

“He got them for you,” her mother said, as if that proved something. Seraphina had never met _him_ and didn’t feel anything towards that statement. She cinched her bag closed and shoved it under the bench seat of the boat.

“Help me to the water?”

Mother and daughter pushed the small paddle boat into the gently rolling water. Warm and clear, the tropical water plastered their red dresses to their legs. Her mother held the rope to the boat so it wouldn’t pull away without Seraphina safely seated.

Seraphina didn’t think there was anything left to say, but her mother seems strangely encumbered with emotion. Still gripping the rope that tethered the boat to her, she said, “It’s different out there, Seraphina.” Hearing her name jarred her enough to take her hands away from the oars. “He told me that it’s terrible and cruel and—”

“And I am exiled because of this.” Seraphina slapped a hand over the pale eye hard enough to bring stinging tears to match her mother’s. The anger fled quickly though. With a sigh, Seraphina carefully stretched forward from her seat to place a kiss on her mother’s forehead.

“And you’ll be different too,” her mother finished. “He wouldn’t tell me how, but this island,” her voice lowered, “it does something. To us.” She looked behind her as if the mothers and daughters could hear her from the shore.

Seraphina felt a jolt in her heart. Her grip turned white knuckled on the oars she reached for again. Whatever that feeling was, it passed. “Throw the rope into the boat, mother.”

The rope fell in a sloppy coil at the bottom of the paddle boat, heavy thumps sending vibrations up Seraphina’s legs. Her mother finally calmed down, her face returning to the calm and cold expression to match the mothers on the shore. Seraphina rolled her shoulders and began to paddle.

Her arms were strong, her frame lean but muscular from farming, woodworking, and pottery throwing. With the suck of the ocean waves helping to pull her out, the mothers and daughters on the island became smaller, the lush green on the island peeking from beyond the beach. Her mother in the ocean rejoined the others on the shore, but Seraphina would always be able to point out the one who gave birth to her. Behind the women, the green fields, the sporadically placed cottages, his castle loomed.

Black stone and twisting spires made the castle a jagged dark tear through the now cerulean sky. If not for that black castle, the island would have been a tropical paradise. Whatever the island was, though, it was home to Seraphina.

With each pump of her arms, a feeling grew in her chest. She looked back to the shore, the figures of the mothers and daughters retreating. All but one. The feeling did not pass. What should have been a transient emotion made her gut clench like a fist had a hold of her insides. Her breath came out in gasping pants that had nothing to do with the steady push and pull of the oars.

The boat shuddered as if it hit a wall. Twisting her head, all she saw was clear sky and blue ocean that blended into a seamless tableau. Turning around, she redoubled her efforts, sweat pouring and mixing with the salt of the ocean on her skin. In front of her, her mother was as small as the tip of her pinkie on the shore. She could see no other figures.

The feeling in her chest shattered. Seraphina managed to pull the oars back into the boat before she leapt up, legs wide and knees bent to keep her balance. She waved her arms above her head, and a strangled sound rushed out of her throat.

“I love my name!” she screamed. “I love it because you gave it to me!”

Her mother didn’t shout or wave back. She probably couldn’t even hear what Seraphina shouted. Still, she waved at the unmoving figure until the remnants of that shattered emotion no longer stabbed at her heart.

She dropped down onto the bench, the paddle boat rocking wildly against that invisible barrier. Grabbing a hold of the oars, she threw her head back. “Let me go! I don’t belong here!”

One, two, three jerks on the oars, and a current ripped the boat through the barrier as if a hole had opened to siphon her out.

First, she felt as if a thick blanket was ripped off of her head. Then, a torrent of freezing water slammed into her. In front of her, through the soaked tendrils of hair clinging to her face, she could still see the beautiful island and the peaceful blue of her home. Above and behind her, the sky roiled with clouds that cracked with earsplitting thunder. Seraphina never heard thunder before. Falling to the floor of the boat and covering her head to protect herself from the vicious lashings in the sky, the churning ocean sucked away the oars she did not think to secure. She reached for her haversack, curling her body around it for comfort and to keep it close while the boat bucked beneath her.

Soaked with rain and salt water, she was certain her mother sent her to Hell. She thought about how she had never felt so cold in her life.

She could feel colder, her body screamed when the ocean upended her boat.

_Swim!_ she screamed back at her body. She remained curled around the haversack, tumbling through the black ocean. The thunder followed her into the water, a discordant symphony rushing in her ears. It didn’t take long for her lungs to beg for air. She still didn’t stretch her arms out to desperately rip for the surface. She didn’t even know which way that was. 

As her chest cramped and a rush of bubbles spewed from her blue lips, the roaring in her ears quieted. Before she could suck in water, a voice slithered in her mind. It didn’t sound like the mothers and daughters. This was new, and she had never heard a different voice before. She couldn’t decipher the meaning, but her lips moved without her volition, repeating back the strange syllables with the last vestiges of her air.

And then there was the rocky shore beneath her clawing hands. She bowed over her haversack as salt water poured from her mouth. She didn’t cough or sputter or spasm, just opened her mouth and the ocean came. When bile burned her throat, she snapped her jaw shut. She rolled to her back, still holding her bag to her torso. She was far enough up the shore that the crashing waves didn’t touch her. Even the rain and terrifying thunder abated.

When she forced herself to sit up and look at the churning beast that almost devoured her, she was surprised to see her island. She raised her hand, covering the island with her palm. How had she not seen this land from those calm white shores? Squinting through the drizzling rain, she saw a flickering in front of the island. Not like the flashes of lightning that made her jump even now, but more like the soft wavering of air above a cook fire. She wondered if she broke something when she pushed through that invisible barrier.

Holding herself up exhausted her. Before her arms gave out, she lowered herself back onto the rocks, ignoring the sharp jabs up and down her backside. The storm moved quickly along, even the sea began to quiet. Seraphina would have contemplated that voice she heard while in the water, but her mind felt heavy and thoughts did not come to her in words, only half realized feelings. When she clutched her bag at her chest, she could hear the faint clink of dalas. She was supposed to do something with those strange coins, but when her mismatched eyes fluttered closed, she lost the thought.

*

“Are you alive, sweetheart?” The question didn’t wake Seraphina. She couldn’t even understand the language the deep voice spoke. What woke her were hands slowly trying to remove her bag from the arms that crossed it to her chest. When the bag moved, her hands curled into claws that gripped the still soaked fabric.

“No,” she hissed, the word shared among their two languages. She glared at the face of a man, and the new visage made the venom she felt run dry. She had seen two faces in her life: the mothers and daughters, the portrait of _him_. No other people or pictures. She was literate (they all were), and she sometimes read stories. But when those stories described appearances, she couldn’t imagine them. The characters in her mind were faceless marionettes, or they sometimes had her face or _his_.

The man before her had drawn back, his hands up as if in surrender. She propped herself up, following his face with an outstretched hand. His bulbous nose drew her like the last ripe peach on the branch. She pinched it between thumb a finger.

“Hey, now, what do you think you’re doing?” A light slap knocked her hand away. She wasn’t offended because it allowed her to pinch the coarse red hair that sprouted from his chin. She got two tugs in before he grabbed her wrist. The man sputtered and tried again, “ _What_ are you doing?”

She thought she understood one or two of his words. It somewhat sounded like her language but like it was garbled.

“I don’t understand,” she said plainly.

He let go of her wrist. “What was that?”

“I still don’t understand.”

“You— what?”

Keeping her bag close to her chest, she forced herself to stand. Her limbs trembled, and the man straightened from his crouch to steady her with a hand on her elbow. He looked at her and then out into the ocean where the island was a black silhouette against the setting sun. The clouds that still lingered in the air turned the sun into a deep red disk that bled into the calm ocean.

“You come from that there island?”

Seraphina didn’t respond. She still couldn’t understand.

“You. Come. From. The. Ocean?” the man spoke slower and louder as if that would span their language barrier. Wait. She did understand one word.

“Ocean,” she said. Before he could try slinging more words at her, she turned, spotting his cyborg horse further back on the shore where the rocks turned to flat boulders. This she recognized. If there were differences between the horses on the island and this one, they were negligible. She shrugged out of his grip and approached the mount.

The man said more words, loud but not angry sounding, she thought. He followed her to the horse, but when she tried to grab the bridle, he grabbed her wrist again.

Anger, hot and fast, made air hiss through her teeth. He let go of her instantly, his hands placating once more.

“Stop grabbing me.”

“I think I can guess what you said,” the man’s grumbled under his breath.

“Mine,” he said louder. “Horse. Mine. Horse. Mine.” He slapped his chest, then horse, then chest, then horse to punctuate the meaning in his words but in a way that made Seraphina think his name was Horse and the horse was named Mine.

She touched the horse. “Mine,” she said to show him she understood. She gave herself a confident nod.

“No,” the man moaned, scrubbing his palms across his face. She noticed the curly red hair on his face also sprouted from his knuckles and the back of his hands. She saw some peeking through the cuffs of his long sleeved shirt. The shiny buttons holding the cuffs closed around his thick wrists reminded her of the coins in her bag.

Oh! The dalas. She reached into her bag and opened the pouch from inside the bag, proud her cleverness to hide the pouch so the man couldn’t see how much she had. She palmed five coins with ‘1000’ embossed in gold and held them out to the man.

At the telltale clink of coin, the man peeked between his fingers. His bright blue eyes seemed to bug out of his skull at what she held. “Five thousand dalas?! That’s the daily cost of a god damned Vampire Hunter!” He looked left and right, behind his shoulder and even behind his horse. He reached out to run a finger over the splay of coins in her hands but stopped. He shook his head, the leather hat hiding his bald pate almost sliding off.

“No, no, no,” he mumbled, forcing her fingers to curl around the money and shove her hand back into her bag.

Seraphina thinned her lips, confused as to why the dalas weren’t working like her mother told her they would.

“I can’t take that kind of money. Not for this hunk of junk,” he said to her disapproving expression. He took off his hat and rubbed at his scalp, the skin shiny enough to reflect the rays of the setting sun. She reached out to also touch his head.

“Stop that.”

She withdrew her hand, only understanding the tone of his voice.

He replaced the hat. “Listen, I know you don’t understand, but I’m going to tell you anyway. I’m going to help you, all right? You’re in dangerous land. In this ugly, terrible world, we have to help each other. Just remember that, all right? We help each other.”

Seraphina heard some words she recognized but not enough to understand in a meaningful way. She didn’t walk away from him though, and that was enough.

“I’ll keep telling you until you understand. We help each other. But first thing’s first,” he said, turning to reach in his saddlebag pulling out a spare saddle blanket. “You’re a little— that dress is pretty but—” He threw the blanket over her shoulder and then pantomimed wrapping himself in the blanket.

Seraphina looked down. The red dress she wore, like so many she owned on the island, was deep cut and made of gauzy material. It clung to her now, revealing each curve and dip of her body. 

Shame. She didn’t know how she recognized it, but it was there making her cheeks hot with blood. She twisted the blanket around her torso, enjoying the warmth it gave her. From behind the blanket she pulled out the same five dalas.

“No!”

Her hand snaked back inside.

The man turned, mounting his horse, but leaning down to offer his hand. “Up.”

“Up,” she said, grabbing his hand and stepping into the stir up to swing her left behind him.

“Okay, yeah, probably better back there. Just hold on though,” he mumbled the foreign words under his breath.

Night fell quickly once they started. She gripped the back of the man’s shirt to help with balance, but she was clearly an experienced rider when no sounds of complaint came from her. The man tried talking to her, saying things like: “your eyes sure are pretty”, “I’m damn sure you came from that island”, and “this is some Noble shit, I bet”. 

He thought she may have nodded off until her hand shot out over his shoulder and right next to his ear. She was pointing at the tall plateau he kept to their left as they rode.

“No, that marks the coastal village Naledzar. They claim the whole coast actually, and they aren’t like us. If they saw you, they would have— nevermind. You can’t understand this. Just no, all right? No.”

She pulled her hand back, thumping her head on his back.

They rode in darkness, the horse seeing what they could not with its night vision. Though needing a tune up, it was surefooted if a little slow. She didn’t realize it, but she nodded off. Each blink was so long, they were farther and farther inland every time she opened her eyes. The smell of the ocean faded into the green scents of woods. Seraphina couldn’t know, but it was odd for a man to ride so surely at night in the Frontier.

“Wake up,” he said. “Wake up and see Catun, your new home.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “He’s dead?” The woman’s lip quivered as she took the red bandanna the old man held out to her.
> 
> “We ran across a couple of thieves from Catun this morning,” he said as if that were the whole story. “Now don’t you go running off. Just because Abe ain’t here no more, don’t mean you ain’t got a role in Naledzar’s survival. There’s plenty of men who need a wife.”
> 
> The red color of the bandanna couldn’t hide the stain of Abe’s blood. She brought it to her lips, the fabric stiff and dry under her kiss.
> 
> “You ain’t going to try to go nowhere, right?”
> 
> She heard the threat. He reached for Abe’s bandanna, but she clung to it as if she could wring out the dried blood.
> 
> “Of course I’m staying,” she said, her eyes downcast to the fabric in her hands. Before Abe left, he said he’d take her to that mysterious island that suddenly appeared off the coast. Said it’d be their late honeymoon when he got back. When it disappeared some thirty hours after it materialized, she felt a dread in her heart. Not an hour after that, the mayor presented her with Abe’s bandanna.

The Vampire Hunter didn’t push his cyborg horse above a leisurely trot. Following the lead given to him in the dying village about a hundred miles north he had made his way to the lone plateau that jutted from the earth as tall as any impressive tower in the Capital. Up close to the base of the plateau, he admired the strata for a moment. Curving lines of orange, red, yellow, and tan made the wall look weathered and natural enough. Dismounting the horse, he scraped his left hand over the formation.

“Yeah, this is definitely an ancient defense tower.” The craggy voice didn’t come from behind the black scarf that hid the Hunter’s face from nose to neck. The declaration came from the mouth pushed against the rock wall. “Huh,” the hand’s voice started.

The Vampire Hunter’s calm demeanor didn’t betray the impatience he felt towards his Left Hand. He heard the wet drag of the tumor’s tongue across the rock.

“Well maintained too. The Prometheus cannons are functional. Hey, you smell that carrion too, don’t you?” Left Hand’s words were punctuated with the crunch of mineral he licked off.

The Hunter glanced at the neat pile of rocks laid out in the approximate length and width of a body. A cairn to mark the grave that concealed the body that had been decaying for three— no. He lowered the fabric from his nose and mouth to breathe deeply. The body was closer to four months old. With that breath came the stink of civilization intertwined with the sea and salt. He determined the village and beach lay a mile away

He replaced the dark scarf over his nose and mouth, the scents still perceptible but dulled. That village by the coast would be Naledzar, and his lead had told them they were in want of a Vampire Hunter to kill the Noble who staked this piece of the Frontier as his own.

The Hunter remounted, a black knight on an obsidian steed. And yet the pace he kept lacked gallant urgency. The welcoming committee was coming to him anyway.

An elder approached on the back of a gray cyborg horse. Devoid of paint or adornment, a cheap base model, the horse seemed a silver streak shooting across the green plains. The Hunter didn’t deem to alter his pace. While the elder had pushed his navel length beard over his shoulder to keep the wind from whipping the salt and pepper curls into his face, the Hunter’s cloak and wide-brimmed hat barely fluttered.

The rider pulled to a sudden stop in front of the Hunter. As testament to his speed, the horse’s hooves ripped up the ground. Blades of grass and soil rained down on the unblinking Hunter. He pulled up a meter from the Hunter.

“You that Vampire Hunter Jonty sent our way? His messenger got here yesterday. Seems your horse is running lame if you just getting here today.” The elder’s voice reeked of false hospitality. His more honest liver-spotted hand curled over the grip of a ten-banger in the holster at his side.

“If you have already solved your Noble problem, then I won’t trouble you,” he said plainly, lifting the reins to turn his horse.

“God dammit,” the man cursed. “That’s what D is short for, isn’t it? God dammit, just stop.” The elder cocked and raised his ten-banger to D’s turned back.

“There’s a one hundred percent markup for threatening me,” D said. 

The man had no right to be stunned by the Hunter’s coldness, not when he drew a gun on someone with their back turned. He still felt affronted.

“You saw Hathron, and you don’t see why I’d be desperate to keep the same thing from happening to my village? I know you saw it. Hathron is in its death throws and we’re not far behind.” The mayor lowered his weapon. “Look, I apologize. I’m Myron, the mayor of Naledzar.”

“His politicking definitely didn’t get him that position,” said Left Hand whose voice was muffled by D’s tight grip on the reigns.

“It’s just we’re running low on time,” he said, slipping the gun back into the holster when D turned around. The Hunter’s black gaze brought a genuine placating tone to Myron’s voice. “Did Jonty tell you any of the situation?”

D remained silent. He would hear the mayor’s take without feeding him input for free.

“Alright then. First, you saw that grave behind you?” D deigned to give him a sharp nod. “That wasn’t the Noble, but it was his fuckin’ dogs from Catun. You know what they do if you looked around Hathron for even a minute. They take all our women. Every last one of them. And then you know what they do? Every four months, they give a woman to that dirty bloodsucker— er, begging your pardon,” he said, trying to reign in the vehemence growing in his voice.

A curt nod and D waited.

“Every four months, a storm comes. The bloodsu— Noble manipulates the weather controller, and Catun gives him a woman when he shows up during that storm. But it ain’t their women they give him. No. They steal _ours_ to give to him. So our population dwindles while theirs stay the same, and they have the Noble’s favor to boot. We guard our perimeters to protect against the thieves they send out, but they’re vicious. That’s how Abe died. Four month ago.”

“How far is Catun,” D asked, showing no emotion to the mayor’s story. He had heard so many stories in the years he spent as a hunter. He got very good at seeing potential holes left in the details.

“About fifty miles east.”

“The Prometheus cannons in your defense tower could reach the village. If you attacked while the Noble was there to make his selection, even he wouldn’t survive.”

“Our— what?”

So the mayor of Naledzar didn’t know what he had in his midst. “Never mind,” he said.

D’s Left Hand was surprised at D’s nonchalance to wiping out an entire village. “You’d have this guy kill a whole village, all those people, for one Noble?” A clenched fist silenced the tumor. The Hunter could muster pity for a people cowed by the Nobility but not for ones who would serve them.

“Cannons…” Before the mayor could attempt to make sense of the strange outburst, the distant sound of thunder rolled over them. “God dammit, and now you see why I may have been a little impatient with you. That’s his storm. So, what do you say? Do we have a deal?” Myron’s cyborg horse sensed his rider's growing panic, pawing at the churned earth beneath its hooves.

“My payment.”

“Right,” Myron said, his tone a disgusted hiss at D’s mercenary attitude. “You’re not cheap, but I have the five million dalas here.”

D snatched the tossed bag out of the air. The dalas didn’t even jingle they were crammed so tightly in the pouch. “I’ll come for the second half after I’ve killed your Noble.”

“WHAT?!” The whites of Myron's bulging eyes were stark against his chapped tan face. “Jonty’s message said five million was your asking price!”

“That was before you threatened me.” D turned east, keeping the camouflaged defense tower to his left, the mayor to his back.

Myron’s fingers twitched along the grip of his ten-banger. “Fuckin’ dhampir.”

The mayor could only curse. Though the thunder grumbled faintly because it hadn’t reached the shore yet, it would move fairly quickly. Myron twisted around to look westward. The storm would hit Naledzar within the hour. He didn’t worry about reaching shelter. His horse would run the mile back in four minutes. However, if D couldn’t get above the standard 15 mph for that piece of shit model cyborg he rode, then it’d take over three hours to get to Catun. By then, the storm would come and go, it’s master gone with another woman.

Myron was about to tell D to bring back the Noble’s head as proof if he somehow got to Catun in time to kill the vampire, but when he turned back around, the Vampire Hunter was a black blur flitting across the plain. His horse could _move_. If his horse could move like that, then he should have been able to travel from Hathron to Naledzar faster that Jonty’s messenger. D had just taken his sweet time making his way to the southern coast.

“Fuckin’ dhampir,” Myron spat again. He didn’t dally. He couldn’t dally. As mayor, he’d have to find the other five million dalas somewhere just in case the Hunter succeeded. He knew the stories of that dhampir, so he knew success was more likely than it appeared.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short chapter but needed to hurry up and put some D in this story.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From Vampire Hunter D Raiser of Gales: “For some reason, the Nobility had chosen to share the fruit of their genetic engineering expertise with the human race. Hereditary diseases were a thing of the past. Even the names of the diseases were no longer remembered by humanity.”
> 
> In truth, the Nobility had to alter the human genome for their own sake. All those millennium ago, the scent and taste of human blood could drive a Noble to mindless savagery. The Nobility’s first goal in genetic engineering was to break the addictive hold human blood had on vampires. They needed and wanted blood, but they would not be enslaved to it.

Four months in Catun, and Seraphina only missed home when she lied down to sleep in her lonely apartment. She wasn’t complaining about the loneliness. In fact, the single room apartment was a respite after the long days working in Catun’s tavern. The work wasn’t hard. Delivering food, drink, and talking to customers was much easier than the laborious duties on the island. Yet every shift never failed to exhaust her. However, when she closed her door to the village and pulled the curtains closed, she could finally get a break from all those faces.

Not that she didn’t enjoy talking to all those faces; she really wasn’t trying to complain too much. After the first month, she could speak their strange dialect with near perfect fluency. She realized that the language the mothers and daughters spoke on the island was an older form of the language spoken on what she was calling “the mainland”. It wasn’t difficult to pick up, but her head still swelled with pride when Gallagher, the man who found her four months ago and the mayor of Catun, sang her praises as a quick study.

The night before the storm hit, her shift ended on the witching hour. Solar lamps lit her way home, splitting her shadow into multiple figures along the cobbled streets. The voice she heard since leaving the island undulated with her shadows’ changing forms as she passed each light source. Some shadows would peel themselves from their tethered point at her feet and walk alone. 

She didn’t worry about meeting someone on her way to the apartment complex that housed Catun’s single women. The apartments were ten tightly packed wooden shacks of fair quality, and only three of them were in use. Besides her, the other two occupants had day jobs and would be asleep. The only other person who would be near the single women’s quarters would be Gallagher if he patrolled that night.

Gallagher didn’t know of her oddities. Or at least that particular oddity. She wrestled with the guilt of hiding things from the man who had brought her to Catun, but that voice in her head…

In the four months she had been in Catun, she had come to understand that the language only she heard in her mind was something ancient. She began to think of it as the language of the earth, the sky, the universe, everything. With that voice came power. One she was afraid to use because with minimal research she knew that Catun’s hospitality would not extend to a witch. Nobody on the Frontier would tolerate a witch.

As if her shadows knew her magical condition must be kept secret, they stopped their independent jaunts when a figure approached.

“Late night?” the ginger mayor asked her in front of her apartment. His hands naturally rested on the handles of his holstered ten bangers.

“Rowdy crowd tonight,” Seraphina said. At Gallagher’s hardening expression, she added, “But no problems.” She only had a “problem” on her first night working at the tavern before she learned the mainland’s dialect. A drunken patron wouldn’t stop touching her, running his fingers down her bare arms, tugging on her long dark hair when she walked by, or getting close to her face while pointing at his own chapped lips while repeating “kiss, kiss, kiss”. 

Gallagher had walked in then. The tavern went deathly still. Someone turned off the jukebox, and the silence smothered the drunken chatter. Tears blurred Seraphina’s vision. Her tears weren’t a product of fear or desperation but anger and pain. Anger because emotions were still so new to her then, and they hit like a fist to the head. Pain because that voice was screaming the words in her head to burn the man.

Gallagher made the man walk towards him with a crook of his finger. He made the drunk put his hand on the bar, palm up. With a white knuckled grip, the mayor put the muzzle of his ten banger flush against the meat of the man’s hand. The drunk didn’t even blubber. Gallagher said something Seraphina couldn’t understand then. The drunk just nodded and screwed his eyes closed.

The drunk’s hand exploded like a smashed overripe melon. His fingers flung towards every corner of the bar, and she could see that he screamed. Her ears rang from the crack of the ten banger, and sound only returned to her after Gallagher allowed someone to wrap the man’s hand and escort him out of the tavern. The voice in her head had quieted with the ringing as well.

“No problems,” Seraphina reiterated as she remembered the geyser of dark blood that sprouted from the drunk’s stumped wrist.

“We’ve got rain coming tomorrow. Around noon, I reckon,” Gallagher said as if that explained the patron’s of the tavern acting up.

“How do you know?” Seraphina tilted her head back to look at the canopy of stars above them. Not a single wisp of cloud traipsed the sky. It hadn’t rained in four months.

“Hands are acting up,” he said, thrumming his fingers on his guns. “Stiff in the knees too. You get this old and things just ache when the weather turns.”

Seraphina nodded to commiserate his pain. Still relatively new to conversations with those other than the island’s inhabitants, talking with her usually led to a dead end. She often forgot certain niceties, like saying “goodbye” and “goodnight”, so she just turned to unlock her apartment door.

“You think your island will show up like it did in the last storm?” Gallagher leaned his shoulder against the door before she could pull it open. He lowered his voice even though they were the only ones in front of the apartments.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I’m certain my leaving made it appear.”

“Ain’t no one ever coming for you?”

“No, no one leaves.”

“Just you,” Gallagher said, using one finger to brush aside the curtain of dark hair that framed her face. “’Cause you’ve got different eyes.”

The mayor was the single person Seraphina talked to about the island and at his behest, she didn’t tell other villagers the details. They didn’t even know about the island because only he was at the coast that day. Thankfully, no one asked where she came from or why she spoke an old dialect of their language.

“But it’s still there under that barrier,” Gallagher said more to himself than to her. She nodded again, keeping her eyes forward and on her door. Gallagher didn’t get offended when she couldn’t maintain eye contact. He said he could understand why she’d get overwhelmed looking at new faces when she lived amongst clones her whole life.

_Clones._

She hadn’t asked what that word meant when he first said it. He had spoke so casually that she felt like she should know such a simple word. She looked it up instead at the single story annex attached to the village’s only school. Anyone could use the digital archives, and she spent a lot of her free time researching when she felt that strange trepidation that kept her from asking the mayor certain questions. That’s where she researched witches as well and only learned about how they should be killed.

“So, listen, about that storm.” Gallagher’s voice enticed her to look at him. “We’re going to have a visitor coming into town that I’d like you to meet, so come to the town hall right before it hits.”

“Okay.”

“O-okay?” He straightened his posture, his weight no longer leaning against Seraphina’s door. She pulled it open and slid into her apartment.

“Yes, I can do that.”

Gallagher had expected some questions about his odd request, who the visitor was, why someone would travel in a storm, why she even had to meet him, anything. Seraphina did find his request strange, but it was no more different than the other aspects of her new life on the mainland. She could not figure out why he looked so expectant.

“Goodnight!” she said a little too loudly when she finally remembered what to say when she wanted the conversation to end. She closed the door in Gallagher’s face, a triumphant smile on her face because she thought she was getting quite good a mainland conversation. On the island, a lot of communication was nonverbal. The mothers and daughters couldn’t read minds, but life was so scheduled and regular, whole conversations were had with simple nods or passing touches.

Seraphina didn’t bother to turn on a light. She stripped out of the long dress she wore for work, the material thicker than anything she owned on the island. The way she had dressed on the island would be considered scandalous on the mainland for a proper woman or so she was told. The idea that there was a proper way to cover her body was just as odd as meeting a stranger that came with the storm. That is why she was in the habit of easy compliance.

Because everything was strange to her outside of the island and its barrier, even herself. Gallagher only thought of the barrier as something to render the island invisible. She couldn’t put it into words yet and didn’t try with Gallagher, but she knew her mother was right when she said the island did something to them. 

She believed it had to do with the archaic incantations she could hear in her mind even now. The voice came to her when she first burst from the barrier into the storm. She knew down into her bones that the barrier had cut her off from the source of a witch’s power. As the voice whispered, she felt as if she were a deep well that had long been empty slowly filling trickle by trickle. Eventually, she would be full of the power she should have always had. Once she was full, she would be able to draw from that well of power with ease. All this the voice told her.

Her boots thumped against the far wall when she kicked them off, following the dress. When she crawled into her narrow bed, uneasy dreams of the storm followed her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll be mixing book lore with my own made up lore. Book lore will be in quotes with the novel it's from. Lore outside of quotes is my own made up bullshit. I got stuck on this chapter, worried that I wasn't being "accurate". As I read more of the books though, the lore is pretty fast and loose, and I'm just going to have fun.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One of the Nobility’s many triumphs in altering the human genome is their most insidious. In the natural order of things, prey will flee at the sight of the predator. Before the Nobility took power, humans recognized vampires as their indisputable hunter. In the year 12XXX, the Nobility’s touch on the human genome has continued to convince the poor species to not fear, even be irresistibly attracted to, that apex predator.

The Vampire Hunter arrived in Catun thirty minutes before the storm, a black hurricane in and of himself. Oily lather bubbled out of his cyborg horse’s flanks, yet D didn’t slow the punishing pace until he reached the town center. He weaved through the narrow streets, past single family homes tightly packed together and a single row of apartments.

He expected Catun’s citizens to be hunkered down for the coming storm. However, a festival greeted him in the main square. Bright ribbons twined around the iron posts of solar lamps, the long tails of the knots flapping in the wind. Stalls painted pastel colors reminiscent of spring bordered the square. When the wind died down, meaty and sweet smells from the stalls lingered in the air only to be swept away by a stronger sigh of wind. Children frantically scribbled chalk drawings onto the cobblestone, though the coming rain would obliterate them soon. Beneath a canopy on one edge of the square, musicians with wooden instruments played melodies that danced above the jubilant chatter of what had to be every member of Catun. Dancing, talking, eating, no one seemed to notice black clouds bearing down on the village.

The celebration stuttered to a halt at the appearance of D. Closest to the musicians corner, they saw him first, and the music ended with a cacophonous screech that drew everyone’s eye. While some heckled the musicians, others were immediately drawn to gaze at the Hunter. The jeers died in a wave that rippled to the very back of square as everyone noticed the overwhelming beauty of the Hunter in their midst. He still wore his wide brimmed traveler’s hat and the scarf that concealed his face from the nose down. Only his eyes -dark, thin, glimmering with unconcealed coldness- were visible. That was enough. Like moths to a flame, the festival goers reoriented themselves to circle around the Hunter.

D slid from his steed’s saddle and took a step towards the crowd. With that step, the radiant blue pendant glowing beneath his scarf darkened. The joints of the cyborg horse groaned, and the beast collapsed on itself. An oily black puddle leaked from the smoking wreckage into the cobblestone. The crowd of one hundred or so people paid the cyborg no mind as they all took a step back to match D’s approach. They gave a collective gasp louder than the strengthening wind when D lowered his scarf so his deep voice could reach their ears. 

D’s nose gave an imperceptible twitch. The wind was at his back, blowing the stench of food and sweat away from him. There was something else in the air, but the wind whisked it away before he could identify the smell. As he spoke, he took deep steady breaths to try and find where that smell originated.

“Who is the mayor here?” The loveliness of his low voice further entranced some and galvanized others. Gallagher was able to shake himself into action.

“I am!” he called, embarrassingly breathless. Long hurried steps brought him to the front of the crowd. “Name’s Gallagher. Anything we can help you with, Hunter?” He eyeballed D’s tactical belt and sword slung across his back. If this stranger wasn’t a Hunter, he thought, he’d eat his own hat.

D’s eyes narrowed. “I am a Hunter. I should be asking you if you need help.” Though his words would be friendly on paper, the coldness with which he delivered them sent a chill down the mayor’s back.

“I- I can’t think of anything right off the top of head that we need help with. Which road did you travel to get here?” The mayor’s face became ruddier than the ginger beard framing his jaw when D continued to stare. “Actually, never mind which road you took to get here. As soon as you got within ten miles of here, I bet it was the most peaceful ride you’ve ever been on, right? We ain’t ever bothered by creatures. We take care of our town and land and never had a need for any Hunter.”

“And the Nobility that has claimed the land from the sea to the village Hathron?”

Gallagher balked. “What about him?”

“Yes, what about him. Tell me his name.”

The mayor thinned his lips as if he could seal his mouth. Under the Hunter’s unwavering gaze, his resolution broke. “The Noble Enoch,” he said, sucking in bellows of air. “He don’t bother us either. He don’t bother none of the villages. The weather controller never malfunctions, the land is always good. It’s all good. All _great_.”

“What a goddamn ass-kiss,” said the garbled voice from D’s left hand, then silenced by the Hunter clenching his fist.

“The vampire doesn’t bother villages, but you do,” D said matter of fact.

Gallagher laughed, bending over and clutching his knees. His guffaws awoke the entranced crowd who began to mill around the town square. They weren’t as jubilant as they were before D’s arrival, but they bunched up into groups to chat, eat, and watch the Hunter from the corner of their eyes. The musicians restarted their set but played a bit quieter to eavesdrop on the conversation between the mayor and the stranger.

D waited and, though he looked as composed as a statue of Adonis, Gallagher felt the sobering miasma of anger emanating from the Hunter. The mayor straightened his posture, flicking away the tear of laughter that drifted to the tip of his bulbous nose.

“Okay, I get what this is. Which mayor was it? Jonty? Myron? Let me guess, we’ve been robbing them blind of their women?”

Still, D waited.

“If that’s what this is, I hope you got paid up front for your trouble, because they’ve wasted a lot of your time. Honestly, I’d be pissed if I were you. You’re D, right? ‘Course you are. Ain’t no one can mistake a dhampir Vampire Hunter like you for anyone else. Well, D, here’s what I’ll do for you. I’m going to set you up at my desk in town hall,” he jerked his head towards the large white washed building bordering the town square, “and let you interview every woman one on one in town about why they came to Catun. I won’t have you interrupting our festival, but I understand that you got to get to the bottom of this.”

If Gallagher would only stop babbling and look closer at D’s countenance, he would have known to stop talking and get out of the dhampir’s way.

When Gallagher had motioned towards town hall, D’s eyes flicked to the building and froze there. A slight figure in a red dress stood alone near the building. With D’s sight, he could see the trembles and twitches of muscles underneath the olive skin of her bare arms. He met her eyes, one a curious pale green and the other a deep brown. Both pupils were blown wide with fear, the colors of her irises almost completely swallowed in black. Her posture, so much like prey, tugged on the primal savagery in the part of his psyche that he inherited from cursed Noble blood. He was still in control though.

And then the wind changed.

Blood was always enticing, but only as a nagging pull on his mind that he ignored or consumed synthetic blood to abate. Sometimes, like all creatures who were damned to be of Noble lineage, it could overwhelm him. Never for more than a moment though, and never something he couldn’t reign in. Human blood wasn’t supposed to be like the days of yore anymore, enslaving vampires to their own lust.

And yet.

When the wind changed, the woman’s dark hair flew forward, concealing her face in wild tendrils. Her scent carried straight to D on that gust, cutting through the stench of Gallagher’s own blood. Her eyes were still locked on him, and he knew what she saw. From Gallagher’s fearful choke, he saw it too.

D’s eyes were blood red. The sclera, iris, and pupil vanished behind the vermilion lens. His fangs elongated, ivory stalactites poking from his upper lip down past his lower lip. He snapped his teeth, wanting to bite, to rip, to rend into gore.

 _Run_ , he thought. Not because he thought she could get to safety. His control hung on a fraying thread. He locked his muscles. A bulldozer wouldn’t be able to move him. But if she ran, that thread would snap, and he could stop fighting himself.

He could smell her sweat, see the bob in her throat when she swallowed, hear the deep breath she sucked in when she steeled her nerves.

She ran and he chased.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reading the novels, I always find it kinda funny how b.e.a.u.tiful D is, and I wanted to play with that and add my own justification to the constant description of his unmatched beauty. Still reading Twin Shadowed Knight!


End file.
